The Church as a Family, Part 2

Through days of preparation, thy grace has made us strong. And now, O King eternal, we lift up. Welcome back to the Clearcast. I'm your host, Tim Dukeman, here with Pastor Dave, Timothy Deaton, and our producer, Martin. And last time we talked about the importance of being, actually having an authentic connection to your family. and having that emotional and logistical and life investment. And today we want to actually—we were trying to draw out an extended analogy. Today we want to bring that home and talk about what does it look like to have the familial type of connection to the church. And so trace that connection for us, Pastor Dave. Yeah. Let's bring this home. Yeah. Well, in the last episode we talked about how— We should expect our children to be alone or to be together with us into their adulthood and being around our grandkids and these types of things. And what I don't think many people realize, even in the family setting, is that if they go away from their family, there will be a setback, a big setback. I said before, when they get married, especially when they have children, they're going to really start to feel that.

And they're not going to like it. They're not going to think this is good. Who's going to watch the kids? Who's going to take the pictures? Who's going to come over for the birthday parties? Who's going to know your children, as a question? And so there's a setback if kids move away from their family. I'm not saying that there aren't any benefits to doing that or that it's not necessary sometimes. I'm just trying to put something on the other side of the scale that says that it's not always good. beneficial to be away from our families, it often has consequences longer term that we weren't thinking about. And I think we understand this in other contexts. If we were to take it out of the context of the family, this idea, or out of the church, which we're going to come to, and move it into sort of the job sphere, the work sphere, what happens when you change jobs?

Well, maybe it's – on the one hand, you say, well, maybe it's better pay. Maybe it's a better environment. Maybe it's a better position. But aren't there setbacks as well to taking another job, a new job? What are some of those setbacks? Well, relationally, you don't know any of the people there, and you don't have any working history with them. And so the trust is not high because we're all still feeling each other out. their willingness to listen, to follow, to trust and give you responsibility, that all has to be developed and built over time. And there's no substitute for it. Unless you're just incredible and you have a reputation that precedes you in work, most of the times you're going to have to spend a while building those relationships and developing that organic connection where it's not about...

just about the rules and the work and the process, but do you know them? Do they know you? Do they want to follow you? And without those things, it makes the work harder to do. Maybe if you used a pastor as an example, if a pastor comes into a new church, he's not able to do things in year one and year two and year three that the guy who's... who's been in his church for 20 years might be able to do. And why is it? Well, is it because the guy who's only been there a year or two isn't as gifted, as good of a leader, as eloquent? Not necessarily. It may simply be because he doesn't have the hearts of the people and the trust and the years of connection and familial memory between him and the people, so he's not able to say and do the things.

That another guy in another context may be able to. There's a real loss. There's a real deficit is what I'm trying to say, to show. To draw that out a little bit, and we've mentioned in the past that we had an ongoing conversation shortly after I joined the church about how you wanted me to get off Facebook. And it was about a year and a half after you originally told me that I did finally get off of Facebook. And that wasn't because... There was necessarily anything wrong with you as a pastor, but it took time for you to demonstrate that you were saying that for the right reason and not for the wrong reason. Because I had experience in the past with other pastors telling me to get off Facebook for the wrong reason. And so I needed to see from you that you were doing it for the right reason. It wasn't actually because it might make trouble for you in some way. It was because you thought it was the best thing for me. And you were right, but...

There is a sense in which you can't have a proper church dynamic or proper work dynamic or anything else without there being time to feel each other out. There has to be that foundation. Yeah, and that's a setback. That's a setback. There's a real benefit to longevity and things being settled. You think of when you move houses. It's like you could have walked through your old house completely blindfolded. And unless the kids left something out on the floor, you wouldn't run into anything. And it's not because you counted the steps to this doorway or to that corner. It's just muscle memory. You just know it. Well, you move into a new house and all of a sudden there's new sounds and there's new creaks. And it just takes time. And so we could multiply examples. Maybe the last one we'll go into is with investing. You're a financial advisor. Isn't it fair to say if we could boil down?

Your counsel, this is general counsel, would be get in and stay in. Get into good investments and stay in them. Right. And it's like, well, what about the market, Tim? What about this is president? It's an election year. What about the economy? What about inflation? What about my job? What about this? And generally your counsel is going to be sit still. Right. Sit still. Stay where you're at. We're in a good place. Let's stay here. Maybe there are some small. But you're like, let's not completely overhaul what you're doing because inflation is higher because of this passing thing. Stay steady. And if you'll do that for the next 40 or 50 years, you're going to be just fine. Yeah. When I bring on a new client, we will sometimes make massive changes to their investment strategy in the first couple of meetings. But after the first couple of meetings… It's set. We've put our face to the horizon and we're going. And it's just about making minor changes, except in rare situations, to stay on plan and keep going forward. And it really is like so much of investing is just don't sell at the bottom. When the market drops, don't sell. That's such an important thing. And I think we have a problem with when we approach church of being willing to sell at the bottom.

That at the moment when you ought to be recognizing the investment that you have in this church and seeing that and valuing that, that's the moment when you throw in the towel. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so to bring it home to the church, if the benefit of getting involved in a church, investing in the church— You're investing yourself and your family and your money and your time and your gifts. It's all give, give, give. But the benefits of the return on that, of you giving yourself, not for this program or this time, but over the course of years and decades, the return that comes back to you is incredible. But you can't see it when you're young or when you're new into it.

You know, when I was up in Wisconsin at that men's conference, I was in a small town, a fairly big church for the size of the town. The church might have been 300 people. And what was really apparent to me is that there was generations of family in that church. There's the dad or the grandpa and his wife, and then there's their kids, and then there's their grandkids. And it's just this big clan of, you know. The Smiths or the Joneses or whatever. And then there were multiple families where it was like that, where there were multiple siblings in the church with all their kids and with all their cousins. And it was really sweet. It gave us stability to the place. It's been here for a while. A new church isn't going to have that sort of feel. A young church isn't going to have that sort of feel. But it's something that we should strive toward.

I think of what, you know, we've got so many young children in our church, just as an example, but it's like in 15 years, how many of those kids are going to be married and having families of their own or 20 years, like 20 years from now, like how many Abusara families will there be in our church? Lord willing, a bunch. And it's going to be like, wow, there's a bunch of, these people have been here a while. Like Indianapolis is not home to my wife and me. in terms of where we came from. But it is home to where our kids come from. They've grown up here. They have connections. They know people. And what I hope is that they stick around, that they stay, that they stay close to... I mean, we've talked so much about a family in the last couple of episodes. You might get the wrong impression, which is that everything that we're focused on is family. Really, family in all of this has been this analogy or this parallel.

to the church. And actually what I think, what we're really trying to drive at is those realities that we were teasing out in the context of the family needing to be true in the church. That our commitments to our family is just a way to process what our commitments to our church and our church family should be. That we would not just take off and go and take off and leave and... stay on the fringes with, that we would invest into the lives, particular lives of the people in the church over time. And that we realize if we decide to pull up our roots and to move on, that we're going to have a huge setback. I said to a family one time that they were moving to be closer to family, moving out of town a few years ago. And I said, you know, you guys came to us and...

They weren't married. They got married while they were here. And they were only here for a couple of years. But, I mean, they ended up just diving in and getting completely connected to everybody. And we loved them. It was such a grief for them to sorrow for us for them to leave. And I said, you know, you have to find another church and do what you did here because you're going to live on the reserves of your relationships and the things that you've enjoyed. and been the beneficiary of in our church. But if you don't go get connected to that again somewhere else, spiritually, you're going to become emaciated over a year. It may take a couple of years, but your marriage is young. Things are very tender here, and you're moving away from, in their situation, you're moving away from a community of believers. You want to go be near family, and I understand that, but that family is not Christian. And you really need to take into account where you're going to get your...

your, your spiritual nourishment, because right now it's all the same. It's the church. It's the church is a place for spiritual nourishment and it's a place for family. You're going to be in your family, but family is not Christian and they're not going to provide for you the things that we, so you need to find a church and you need to be invested and you need to set down roots there. And they went, they went and we've had occasion to see them again. We love them. And. They were lamenting like a year after they had left about how hard it was to find a church that they could invest in the way that they had been able to do here. And they hadn't anticipated it being that difficult. They've since found a good church and they're a part of it. And I'm very thankful for that and for the pastors of that church loving them and caring for them. But there was a huge setback in their life. And they realized it after the fact. Like, wow, we...

That was harder, way more difficult spiritually and practically in our life. They went up and had twins, and they were still looking for a church, and the family was only able to provide so much support, and it was a very difficult time. It was very hard on them. And so when you change churches, especially the longer you've been there, it's going to take a long time for... for you to settle in and to reconnect. Martin, I think of you guys, you grew up in a church and a couple of years ago, there's a huge theological shift and church tradition shift and stuff. And it's like, you've been here for a little over two years now, right? And you're still settling in. You don't have the closeness and the longevity and the relationships here that you do even still to this day with your home church, with your family, because there's decades there. And it's a transition. It's still a transition.

It's been two years, and it's like, yeah, I don't know how many more years it'll be, but it's still, it's just taking time. And I can't imagine what it would be like for that kind of transition to be a normal part of your life every two to three to four years. Right. I would just have to assume that there's a whole part of what I feel that just wouldn't even be there for you. Does that make sense? Like the person, what I mean is, if you can make those kinds of transitions regularly and them not be traumatic to you. then it just simply means you don't know what it's like to have those sort of connections with people. Right, yeah. You just have lived your life without those sorts of connections. Right, and then there's, I mean, yeah, I think it can be very destructive in terms of your perspective on the Church, on the Gospel, on your disability, on your ability to manage trouble and turbulence in your own life. Like, there's no home base to, you know, I made it to base, I'm safe.

If you don't have that, it's like you're out and you're alone and you're adrift. And the whole goal is not to just scare everyone away from ever moving on. My point is just to say, if you're going to move on from your church, you should have a really good reason to move on from your church. And you should do that with counsel, and you shouldn't do it lightly. It's going to be hard for your family. We've had occasion, because we're a church plant out of... Our sending church down in Bloomington, there's been a lot of traffic back and forth over the last 15 years between the churches. And the churches love each other. There's lots of familial connections, both directions. And what people have had to realize is that the church... For one, we're not the same church. We have the same principles and the same priorities and the same commitments, but...

Church life is very different. You're not interchangeable. No. And certainly the relationships are not. And what I've heard multiple times from people who have moved up here for a period of time for various reasons and then gone back to Bloomington, they're like, the church is not the same as it used to be. The relationships are not like... And it's because there was a relational setback when they moved up here. And then you take for granted the relationships you have and the connections you have until you don't have them anymore. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, wow. I used to just take comfort in that person being there. It's a weird thing. For a number of years when we were new in the church, one of our elders, Dan, I love him. He's a brother. And anytime he and his family were not there, I just felt like, well, I just don't know if we're going to make it.

It's just him and his wife and his boys just being present at church. It was like, oh, there's a connection. There's a brother that we can do it together. And they'd go to visit family on holiday or something like that, and they wouldn't be here. And I was just like, where's my brother? I miss him. And I just think that it's such a sweet. gift from God to have that with other people. But on the other hand, I feel like it's probably strange for a lot of people to be like, you feel that way about people in your church? And I'm like, uh-huh. I couldn't imagine not feeling that way about it. And so if you're changing churches or when you change churches, it should be done very infrequently. And it should be done for very good reasons. And I would not put job opportunities as a...

a lock of being a good reason to change. I could tell stories of men that have given up significant promotions, significant professional opportunities for a simple reason that on more than one occasion I've heard men say, my family needs this church. My family needs this church. I had a guy one time up in Toledo. Toledo, Ohio is not a very pretty place as far as topography. And it's not the place you go visit. And he was acknowledging that. He's like, the only reason I'm in Toledo is because of my commitment to the church. He's one of the elders up there. He's like, there's nothing about Toledo that is calling me here except these people and this church. And I've made my whole life revolve around this place because we don't want to... We're needed and...

we need from this church. And so that man was describing a very high commitment to the church where he'd had many opportunities to move on. I've heard people, they say, well, we're going to change churches because there's no one here that's our age. Well, it's just sad to me because I'm like, well, why don't you go bring some people who are your age? I mean, I don't know if it's sinful or not, but my thought, my initial thought when I heard that one time was like, so it's not only my job to provide, to like preach the gospel to you, it's also my job to provide all of your friends. Like you can't even go make friends in the world. Like you have no neighbors that you're even willing to talk to. I have to provide every facet of your life or you'll leave. And it's not that I don't, you know, it's like not that I...

It's not that I'm unaware of the sense of like there aren't people like me here or many people like me here, but I don't think it's a good reason to leave. I had one guy tell me, he's like, oh, well, like three or four of our friends have moved out of the church and there's really no one left here, so we're going to move. And I was like, so the church is losing people that are leaving for various... It was a season a few years ago where we lost like six or seven families in the course of like six months. And all of them were dearly loved.

And toward the end of it, there was another family that was like, yeah, all of our friends have left, so we don't really feel connected here anymore. And so we're going to go back home where we have friends. And I was like, so we're hemorrhaging people, good people, and you're good people, and you're leaving because you don't have any friends. I wouldn't have come plant at a church if having friends was my ordering principle. My wife and I left everybody we loved and knew to come up to a place where we didn't know anybody. Yeah. And God's given us, over the course of these years, friends and family. But if we've been like, oh, that's just going to be too much, then we wouldn't have done it. And so I want us to be, when it comes to leaving a church or moving on, I don't think a good church member is the kind of person who's packing up and leaving, who sees people just as acquaintances or, well, yeah, I go to church with those people.

The scripture doesn't talk about them as those people or these acquaintances, their brothers, their sisters, their mothers, their fathers, their sons, their daughters, their aunts and uncles. And so our commitment to church isn't any more voluntary than the reality of our commitment or our connection to our family. Like, you don't get to decide who your parents are. You don't get to decide who your siblings are. Every sibling group has someone in the family that's like, I don't really like that guy. That brother, he just makes me crazy. But you don't get to pick them. And you have an obligation to love them even though they drive you nuts sometimes. And that's also true in the church. There's guys in our church that naturally I would never be friends with. And they would never be friends with me because we don't have the normal things in common. But they're more than friends. They're brothers now. And it's taken work for both them and me to learn to love each other.

because we don't speak the same way and we don't have the same gifts. And we can rub each other the wrong way without trying very hard if we're not mindful of it. But we've come to be better than friends. We're brothers. We rely on each other now. And I couldn't imagine living without those men and their support and their help and their presence in my life. And I think they would say the same thing. And so... The idea that, and I don't think that's unique to the pastors or should be exclusive to the pastors and the elders. I think that should be true of the people of the congregation as well. I don't think you should take a better job just because it's a better job. I don't think you should let a little relational tension with, or a lot of relational tension with someone in the church be the impetus for you to pack up and leave.

I don't think the fact that you don't have friends in the church that are your age, people who are just like you, is a good reason to leave a church. Something on the point of having people your age, your friends, at some point we have to be willing to just have faith that God will provide for our needs. If we can read Genesis and see God say it's not good for man to be alone and supernaturally, out of a rib fashion, help me for him. Why can't we trust God to bring us friends within the Church? Yeah, or to sustain us without them. There are times in God's providence where we have needs that, in His wisdom, He withholds the apparent answer to those things. And we don't know why. And it is a lack, and it's real. But that's not a reason to leave. I mean, I just don't think that it's a... I think our commitment to the Church and to the people... It's interesting, in a family,

very, very few people are the same age. Everybody's different. There's grandparents and there's parents and there's kids and there's older siblings and younger siblings. There's not this big group of people who are just like you. But we've got this strange idea in church that if there aren't a bunch of people just like me, that something's wrong. And I'm like, well, that's not what a family looks like. I mean, if you get a big family... That's what a litter of puppies looks like. That's what a litter of puppies looks like. That's right. Yeah. One of the things I was thinking is that... Sometimes you don't need brothers and sisters. What you need are fathers and mothers. Yeah. Like those are the people that you really need. And that's maybe why you don't have friends your age that have all your same interests and do all the same things with you. It's because what you really need is someone leading you and directing you because you need help. And God knows that. Yeah. Yeah. And the older, you know, you're, how old are you, Timothy? 28, 29? 28. Yeah. So you're younger.

You're saying I need older people to help me and to guide me and kind of point me in the right direction. But the same is true of those who are older. They need young people around. Young people drive older people nuts. Like just drive us nuts. And I'm not old, but I'm older. And I just look at the things. He's talking about me. I drive him nuts. I'm not only talking about him. He is definitely. I'm talking about all three of them. No. No. Older people need younger people because we look at them and we're like, why are they so stupid? And then we remember we were stupid too and probably still are. Not as stupid as them, but we were stupid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the person 20 years older than us is looking and is like, when are you going to figure it out, dude? And so we need each other and we need people who are not just our age. I know we're kind of a bit of a soapbox here about this, but it hurts because when people are like, yeah, I want different relationships.

And like the ones that are here are not good enough. I'm like, well, I think that your investment in the church, the reason that's the case is because your investment, your individual investment in the church is low. You have not actually developed that stuff. That's why you feel this way. Yeah, let me jump in on that. I thought about this. I'm a financial advisor, so this is how I conceptualize. But if you think about someone who doesn't tithe and they go to church for 15 years. Like what's their level of investment going to be in that church versus someone who does tithe? If you make $70,000, you tithe 10%. That's $7,000 a year. If you go to church for 15 years, you have $105,000 invested in that church. And that's a completely different level of commitment. And the attachment that you have for that church is going to be completely opposite of the person who didn't tithe or only gave a few hundred dollars here and there or whatever it is.

It's going to be a worlds apart level of commitment. And so the person who has $105,000 invested in that church is just not going to pack up and leave because there aren't people that are rich. Or they're not just going to pack up and leave because of a minor theological difference or the pastor said something they didn't like or whatever it is. It's going to take a whole lot more. They're going to see the investment. They're going to see that it's going to be a setback to go to a new church, that that $105,000 is gone if they don't stay. And if we're going to have a connection to our churches and we're going to feel connected like we're part of a family, we're going to have to give of ourselves, not just financially but also relationally, also emotionally. We're going to have to invest. We're going to have to be willing to get hurt. Yeah, and to reconcile when we do. Yeah, and that's family life. I heard a story one time. I don't know if it's true. Recently where someone was moving, and I said, well, why are they going?

Like, where are they going? And they're like, oh, they're moving. I don't know where it was. Kentucky, Tennessee, somewhere. Somewhere in the mountains, somewhere pretty. And I said, why are they going there? And they're like, well, they really like the skyline. Like, the topography is really. And I'm like, well, yeah, the Blue Ridge Mountains and whatever the mountains are. They are actually really pretty. It's a very beautiful place, sure. But I was like, that's how they're making it. Like, if it's true, and I don't know if it is. That's how you pick a vacation. Yeah, that's how you pick a vacation. Yeah. I'm like, man, I think that we should have a much higher priority on our church life and our church involvement in making those sorts of decisions and coming home to our family, to our church families, because those setbacks over time are very consequential. They're very consequential.

I don't feel selfish saying that people should be committed to their church and committed specifically, not just to like, well, I'm committed to Jesus, so I'm committed to the local church. But I mean the actual flesh and blood people in your church. You know their names. You've sat at their tables. They've sat at your table. You've prayed together. You've gone to each other's, the kids' birthday parties. You've grieved over the miscarriages. You've done the work of family with them. That your commitment should be to them. And trust that God will use it and bless it over time to realize that he's knit you together as a family. And when the rough times come, you say, we'll get through this. It's a helpful perspective and commitment to say, when the hardship comes, you go, you know what? I don't know how exactly yet, but we're going to walk through this together. We're going to do our best. And when we fail and sin and all these other things, we're going to work through that too. Yeah.

And that's going to change how the reconciliation plays out because what – one of the bedrocks of any good marriage is that the marriage isn't on the table during the fight. Right. And that's what you have to get to with your church as well is that your loyalty isn't on the table, that you're going to figure it out. And that's the assumption going in. And that's going to change the tenor of the conversation. There's not going to be the level of desperation in a marriage or in a church in a reconciliation process if you've already decided beforehand that your loyalty is not on the table. Yeah, and I think that that – I mean that's sort of a foreign concept in the church that you would have that level of commitment to like we really have a real disagreement or a real offense or a real sin, and we're going to stay at the table and we're going to work it out. I think that's really important.

And it all sounds good in theory until you get to a real life situation where, where it's real ammo. Yeah. There were real sins. Like you're really actually upset with the person. And it's like, it's costly. It's hard. I remember saying it was to you a few years ago or whenever, I want to see a year ago. You were up. Timothy was upset at me about something and was, and I'm glad you came and told me. He's like, I'm really mad at you because. you screwed this up or, you know, and you've taken, you know, you've made assumptions that, you know, he's just mad at me. And my response was like, oh, okay, well, I may have, surely I've sinned against you. But I think one of the first things I said to you was, Timothy, I don't know if you're gonna like what I have to say, but actually some of these problems that you're upset about, they're not, I didn't cause them, you caused them.

And I'm willing right now to help clean the mess up. Like, I love you. We'll work this out. Like, let's just remove all of the pressure that like the walls are falling down. Cause they're not, we will clean this mess up and I'll do whatever I need to, to help clean the mess up. And I don't care how it got made, but you're not going to blame me for every bit of this because I did not cause these problems. And it was like, it was tense. Like I felt like, Oh, if I say this, like he's going to, he could just storm off and be gone. Like.

It wasn't a thought in my head. It's always a thought in your head. And it was God's kindness. We were able to work through the disagreements, the hurt feelings, the issues, and find the resolutions, and it was good. And we all grew through it. Where I can imagine other situations where something less intense than that, where if you came to the pastor and said, hey, I think you've done this wrong, it's like, well, if he doesn't agree with me, then I have to leave. Because there was a disagreement at that one time about that one thing. It's a low commitment. We were talking before we started the episode, and I mentioned to you, hearing a particular guru, it was Jordan Peterson talking about why we need marriage, why marriage is good. And he said it's not because it's idyllic and loving and sweet and all of those things. It's because we actually need someone in our lives who is committed to us and we're committed to them no matter what. Because he said,

You've been married for six weeks. You're just barely in the honeymoon, and you get in a huge fight, and you realize that the fight wasn't about whatever you were fighting about. It was because one of you was hurt by your uncle, and he was mean to you or left you scarred for whatever reason, and now you're this messed up person, and you both realize, oh, we're messed up people, but we can't leave. We're not going to leave just because we're messed up people. We're going to figure it out, work it out. That doesn't mean everybody has that view, but that view is more common. than the view that I would treat church that way, that I would come into church and say, oh, now somebody who's not just my wife. There's a different feeling when it's like, well, my wife knows all my problems, but the church people don't. But over the last two and a half years that we've been in this church, one of the greatest blessings I've had is gradually and slowly, the elders, some of the members, you guys know my problems.

Like my wife has come to church and she'll talk to one of the ladies and be like, this is what happened this week. And I'll know while she's standing over there talking. I'm like, okay, now they know what's wrong with me. But that's also a sweet thing because you go, they know what's wrong with me and they still love me. They're not like, oh, now we've got to put Martin in quarantine because we figured out what his bugs are, what his virus is, and we don't want anyone else to catch it. Being in that place where we're committed to each other is actually a prerequisite.

a prerequisite for us as humans to actually growing and changing and learning and being, to be our full potential. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean, as we've been talking about this issue of family and commitments to family and commitments to church, like I keep feeling this pressure of like, but which one's more important, your commitment to your family or your commitment to your church? And I think one of the most like offensive things. Jesus says, in no uncertain terms, it's the church. He who loves father or brother or mother or sister more than me is not worthy of me. And you're like, wait, what a minute. You're taking my closest relationships and saying that I'm not supposed to love them? And we'll explain them away and we'll say, well, it doesn't mean that you can't love them. It just means that you just can't love them more than me. And it's like, well, okay, but how much of a temptation is that? It's actually a real temptation. There's actually a danger.

that you would love your family and prioritize your family more than you would prioritize the church. And here's the thing, your relationships and your families will change as people get older, as people fall away, as they sin. It's not the family that's the pillar and support of the truth. It's the church that's the pillar and support of the truth. And so our commitment to the truth is demonstrated not by our commitments to our family, but to the Lord through the church. Well, even as you say that, I think a lot of the people listening to this episode are going to hear you quote that verse and say, no, Jesus is talking about if you love your father, mother, son, or daughter more than me, not more than you love the church. Right. And that's because we have a fundamental misunderstanding of the connection between Christ and his church. It's his bride. I mean, he loves his bride. Well, think about— Paul on the Damascus Road, when Jesus confronts him, and Jesus says to him, why are you persecuting me? Well, Paul's never even seen Jesus in the flesh before, but Jesus identified himself so closely with the Church that he said, if you're persecuting me, you're persecuting the Church.

Or I'm sorry, if you're persecuting the church, you're persecuting me. There's an intimate, organic connection between the two. Yeah, and so we have to have these things married together. And I'm not trying to say that family and church have to be set at odds with each other, but I am saying they have to be set in the right priority. Yeah, and I want to speak to the issue of commitment for a second, like kind of going with what you're talking about. There's the old statistic that you've probably heard quoted. in a misleading way that 50% of all marriages end in divorce. But what that statistic is picking up is that someone who gets divorced once or twice is almost certainly going to get divorced five times. And once you've been divorced a couple of times already, you usually keep getting divorced, and that's how the number actually gets up to 50% is the people who get divorced over and over and over and over again. They skew the distribution. And so we need to think about,

We should decide now what kind of person we want to be. Are we going to be the person that gets divorced over and over or gets divorced from a church over and over again? Or are we going to be the person who stays married to our spouse, stays married to our church? Yeah, I think that there are commitments. We're not going to fail in our commitments in the direction of being too committed to our church. I'm not saying you can't. You're not also a husband or a wife or a mother or a father. Those are our natural affections. There was a story, maybe it'll help get at this. There was a family that I've known for, we've known for a long time, over a decade here. And one year, one week, some of the family, the husband and a number of the kids, showed up to church on Sunday. And they were just talking to them. We've known them, but they've never been members of our church. They're a member of another church.

They weren't at their church that Sunday for reasons I won't go into, but I was talking with the dad and he was talking about some of his kids and I asked where one of his sons was and he says, oh, well, they're very grieved because he's dating a girl that they don't approve of and she's taken him out of the family church. And the problem was... The church that they attended and had grown up in was like, there was a very, the reason they were at our church that particular Sunday was because the church made a decision. I want to think it was about nursery or Sunday school that the family didn't agree with. And so they demonstrated their objection by not going to church the first Sunday that the church was having the thing. That's why they were at our church.

But he's also grieving that his son has now moved on to a different church with this woman that he's, I don't know if he's dating or engaged to, he's going to get married to. And he was just like, we always wanted, like the church was, we were always going to be a family that worshiped together. We were always going to all be in the same place. And I said, yeah, but the thing is, you were a family. Like your commitment to that church was really low. All they provided was a time and a place for you to do a family function. But the church isn't a family function. The church is... It's not a biological family function. It's a spiritual family function. And you opted out of the spiritual family function. And now, as a result, your son's doing the same thing to you that you've done to the church, was he's opting out of the biological family function because he's like, I don't have a commitment to this. And all the while, they just wanted their family to stick together and just be this growing brood of...

generations of people all in this one church. And that was really the church's job was just to facilitate something they approved of as a family. And they lost their son. And I thought, yeah, I can see why he left. You guys prioritized your family over the church. And he was not able to grow. He was not able to become a man and get out from underneath his mother, particularly in that situation. And so now he's come of age and he's just decided, well, I'm out of here. And they really could not figure out why things had come to be the way they were. And I go, it's because you guys have no commitment to – there's nothing outside of your family that your family is committed to. The family is just committed to the family. And most families I've seen where the propagation of the family is the goal, the family tends to deteriorate and crumble and fall apart because there's no common – There's no mission. There's no mission. There's no, hey, we're here for anybody other than ourselves. It's just selfish. And so –

I thought that what would have been helped is if they had actually been at church. I thought the reason you're not at church today is the perfect illustration as to why your son is opting out of your family. You guys aren't committed to that church, and now you're reaping the fruit of it, and it's bad fruit. You don't like it. And they'd been there for decades, but they were not. I mean, they were fussing over whether or not the church was going to have a nursery or something. And you're like, I was thinking, why don't you guys just leave that church? You're clearly not committed to it. And it's just like, well, because that's our church. It's like, but it's not your church. They made some little insignificant decision, and you're being passive-aggressive and not dealing with it. And so I want to say that your commitment should be to the church. The church is God's family on earth. It's not your nuclear family.

And if you want good relationships in your nuclear family, then what you have to do is together serve the living God in his house with his other people and see your tribe, your family, increase through your relationships to other people. And all the turbulence and hardships and struggles that come along with that, it's worth it. You figure it out. And I'm not going to qualify that any more than to say I realize there are awful things that happen in churches from time to time and that need to be dealt with and are good reasons to leave, whether those things are major theological shifts or abuse or these sorts of things. But those are not the normal things that are causing people to leave churches, if we can just be honest. People aren't leaving churches because of that every day. They're leaving churches because they instituted a nursery policy they didn't like.

And they're not counting the cost of those decisions. And we should be counting the cost of those decisions and settling in our hearts and in our families what our first commitments are. And it's to the Lord, and to be committed to the Lord is to be committed to his church. That's right. And so I think that's a good place to wrap up. We've been discussing what it looks like to actually invest in the church. And so next time we're going to talk about what it looks like to actually sacrifice for the church. and how much sacrifice we should be willing to give up for the church. And so that'll be on the next episode. So tune in soon to hear the next episode of Clearcast.